


The Two Windmills

by Kiarawolf



Category: The Dam Keeper
Genre: Friendship, M/M, into love, the dam keeper - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-04
Updated: 2016-05-04
Packaged: 2018-06-06 07:42:17
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,783
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6745360
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kiarawolf/pseuds/Kiarawolf
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Pig and fox live together, play together, and fight the ash storms together - that is, until feelings make things complicated.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Two Windmills

**Author's Note:**

> No profit is being made.  
> This is only a fan work, the characters and world belong to Directors Robert Kondo and Dice Tsutsumi.

 

_Pig_

  It’s been five years.

 Five years since let the smoke in, and I’ve sworn not to do it since. Every morning, I turn the dial, and every night, I set my stopwatch, and then I wake to its chime in order to turn the dial again.

  Fox helps. That is, he doesn’t actually help turn the dial – I’ve grown enough to have no trouble doing it myself. He just helps in general.

  We share the windmill, since neither of us have anywhere else to be. We go to school together, riding the yellow bus down the mountain every morning and back up again every evening. The other students, they still don’t like me all that much. They like fox, though, which helps.

  We draw together, and cover the walls with our sketches. There’s a whole wall reserved for silhouettes of our windmill, and in the kitchen we’ve pinned up only drawings of food. The roof, above our bed, that’s saved for drawings of us. I’m not all that good at drawing, really. I’m better at turning dials. But fox is, and he helps.

  When we were younger we’d spend all day playing and laughing and teasing, chasing one another around the windmill and drawing silly shapes on our faces with sooty charcoal. Now that we’re older, we’ve taken to sitting peacefully in the evenings, our backs leaned up against one another and our eyes looking out our respective windows – I look out into the smoke, and the darkness, watching that it doesn’t come near, and he looks down on the town, where the sunset halos the lines of washing hung between the houses, and birds and citizens alike call to one another in preparation for night-time. It was hard, before, to have to watch both windows by myself; fox helps.

  Keeping the windmill turning is more work than it used to be. My father taught me all he knew, but the weather is changing – more and more often, fierce storms battle against the protective power of my windmill’s blades, threatening to tear her sails away, threatening to stop their spin. Those days, I don’t trust the power of the clogs, for they stall far quicker than my stopwatch says they should. I stay in the dial room, waiting for the sails to fail, and fox stays with me, ready to step in should I fall asleep. We miss school, of course; and we don’t know what it is we’re missing, so we have to make it up. Fox tells me grand tales of warriors and dragons that he claims are part of history, and I ask him to write essays on the meaning of made up words. Eventually, the storms pass, and we can use the stopwatch once more – we make our way back up to our bed, and, though I’m tired, I find it hard to sleep. What if the storm comes back? What if my lonely little windmill isn’t enough, next time? Fox brings his arms around me, and that helps.

  But sometimes he doesn’t help. Sometimes I see him, in class, and the sun has lit his fur, and there’s a fluttering in my stomach that makes it hard to concentrate on my work. Sometimes at night, he sleeps curled right up against me, his light snores a steady rhythm near my ear, and it makes it hard to breathe. Sometimes he’ll look at me, from across the room, and there’ll be a smile in his eyes and a promise in his smile that steals my ability to be coherent, steals my ability to look at him without my pink skin turning red, steals my entire presence of mind. There’s nothing but him, and the sun in his whiskers as he laughs.

  I never tell him. Not about the breathing thing, or about the fluttering, or about the sun. I think he knows, though. He only holds me on storm nights. When he’s showing me how to draw a certain thing, he’s careful not to let his paw stay over my hand for too long. There’s a space between our bums on the bus – not large, but more than there was when we were young. He talks a lot about frog and wolf and bunny, but he never asks me who my crushes are.

  The storms only get worse. The townspeople design a second windmill, and fox offers to staff it – after all, who else (save me) knows how these things work? Its construction takes little more than a month. It sits further along the damn wall than mine, and it’s far larger. When storms hit, as they do more and more often, we fight them together, each in our own windmills, carefully watching the dials. While I’m waiting for the sails to fail, I’ll make up words, and imagine their definitions. He’s not there to tell me if I’m right, but that doesn’t really matter. They’re made up, anyhow. When the storm’s over, I’ll make my way to my bed, and I bring down the blanket that I have saved, especially for storm nights. It’s the one we used, when he was still here – it’s thick, and heavy, and he’s shed his fur all over it.

  There’s a walkway between our two windmills, and every evening we meet in the middle. We sit with our backs leaning against each other, him looking down over the town, me looking out into the ash cloud. I try to keep my eyes on the darkness only, and keep my thoughts on the warmth of his back. If I look to the side, I’ll see his windmill, with the light on in the window, and the curl of cooking smoke rising from the chimney. My own is quiet, dark – lonely. But sitting with him, watching our town together; it helps.

 

_Fox_

 

  I’ve drawn pig more times than I care to count. Pig sleeping, pig reading, pig laughing. It’s no wonder I can etch his likeness by memory, the lines that my charcoal stick makes falling readily onto the page, the familiar circle of his snout and the difficult fold of his ears coming together to build my friend. Drawing myself is harder, and I don’t always get it right. I rarely get anything right.

  Before I got my own windmill, I used to hide these type of drawings in the wall – there was a loose board above the kitchen, that pig had never noticed. When he was out, I’d take them down to look at, and sometimes I’d add another to the collection. I was always very careful to put them back before he returned home.

  He found them eventually, of course. He never confronted me, of course not, not pig… but it was clear that something was different. Whenever I smiled at him, he’s look away, tense; whenever I pressed up against him on the bus seat, he’d clench his fists, and hold his breath. So I moved away. Not just on the bus seat – I got a windmill of my own.

  He seems more relaxed now that he has his space back, calmer. There’s a slowness to his movements now, and a lingering when he smiles at me. We spend each evening together, and I’m glad to at least still have that. Sometimes I’ll bring him dinner, and we’ll eat it together while we watch our town. Sometimes I’ll bring my sketch book, and we’ll draw what we see – his drawings are a swirling page of charcoal, the ash storms angry and relentless even on the page. Mine are of the town, houses with lines of washing between them, the sun between the hills – a bird, in flight. I want so badly to turn and to draw him, but I don’t. I haven’t drawn him, not since… I don’t even know if I can anymore. The shape of his snout, the fold of his ears – I don’t know if they would still come easily, or if I’ve forgotten them.

  One day, a storm comes that is stronger than anything we’ve faced before. The ash rails against us, and we hunker down in our respective dial rooms, ready to crank them back on when they fail, and fail, and fail again… Pig’s windmill looses a sail. I fall asleep in the dial room, and only wake to the thick stench of ash coating my throat – I cough it up, as much as I can when the air I’m breathing only brings more in, and I race to the dial, tugging it down and around, winding her up. She starts, reluctantly, the clogs chattering their protest, and slowly the storm retreats.

  I join pig on the walkway in the evening. We sit back to back, as always, but for once we don’t look on the town and the darkness, instead we look at our windmills. The sails of mine has a few tears, and there’s a black dust coating the previously cheery paint. Pig’s looks far worse – the wood is old, and the nails long gone rusty. Whole sections have lifted loose. I can see into the bedroom from here, the little cot we used to share calling to me to come sleep, come curl myself in the thick blanket and relax.

  I go home instead. The stew I’ve been brewing while I’ve been out is now done, so I take it to bed and eat there. My sketch pad sits across the room, the paper accusingly white. Once I’ve finished my dinner, I go over to it, and stand; charcoal stick in hand, ready to draw. Nothing comes.

  The next day, I travel down across the walkway to pig’s windmill, and we begin on the repairs. I’m sewing a new sail together when I hear something clutter in the kitchen – I call to pig, but he doesn’t respond.

  I find him bathed in light. The wall above the stove has fallen in, giving the room a second window. The board I hid my drawings under is freshly torn, and the paper is still settling. One drifts over to land at my feet – an older drawing, just the two of us playing, and the windmill in the background.

  Pig holds another. The way his ears fold over looks like a question mark. He turns the sketch around, showing it to me. It’s a newer one – the two of us walking through town, holding hands. One of the last ones I drew, in fact, before…

  But pig is touching the drawing, charcoal brushing off onto his hand, and then he holds that hand out to me, offering… carefully, I take it. The soot disappears between our entwined fingers, and there’s only light left.

 

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading! Please leave a comment to let me know what you thought, it really makes my day!!!


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